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Updated: September 11, 2025
If the statements just quoted do not place the secret society of Masonry on a footing decidedly Pagan, it is difficult to say just where it does stand.... "Tammuz, or Osiris of Egypt, who is declared to be the original of Hiram Abiff the temple-builder, is still mourned for. Ezek. 8:14. See Young's Analytical Concordance or any standard Greek Mythology. Now see Piersons' Traditions of Freemasonry.
Laments for the departed Tammuz are contained in several Babylonian hymns, which liken him to plants that quickly fade. He is "A tamarisk that in the garden has drunk no water, Whose crown in the field has brought forth no blossom. A willow that rejoiced not by the watercourse, A willow whose roots were torn up. A herb that in the garden had drunk no water."
The festival of Tammuz became an occasion when the memory of those who had entered Aralû was recalled. While there are many details connected with the ceremonies for the dead still to be determined, what has been ascertained illustrates how closely and consistently these ceremonies followed the views held by the Babylonians and Assyrians regarding the life after death.
My only brother, let me not perish. On the day of Tammuz, play for me on the flute of lapis lazuli, together with the lyre of pearl play for me. Together let the professional dirge singers, male and female, play for me, That the dead may arise and inhale the incense of offerings.
It was in reference to one of these images, laid out in the temple at Jerusalem, to which the jealous Jehovah, considering it a great abomination in his own house, is made to direct the attention of Ezekiel, the prophet, who, looking, beheld "Women weeping for Tammuz" as recorded in the eighth chapter.
When Tammuz thought of the brave and spirited little maiden who had had pity on the woodcock her falcon killed, and her gracious mother who had nursed sick children and heard the troubles of the poor, ever since she came to that rude land, he did not like to think of the torch and the pike of the half-barbaric Welsh let loose upon the valley.
On the Phoenician coast was a river Kadisha, "the holy," and the Canaanite maiden saw in the red marl which the river Adonis brought down from the hills the blood of the slaughtered Sun-god Tammuz. The temple of Solomon, built as it was by Phoenician architects and workmen, will give us an idea of what a Canaanitish temple was like.
It is perfectly clear from the texts which have been deciphered that Tammuz is not to be regarded merely as representing the Spirit of Vegetation; his influence is operative, not only in the vernal processes of Nature, as a Spring god, but in all its reproductive energies, without distinction or limitation, he may be considered as an embodiment of the Life principle, and his cult as a Life Cult.
But meanwhile from the East there strayed swarms of enigmatic faces; the harlot handmaids of her Celestial Highness Ishtar, Princess of Heaven; the mutilated priests of Tammuz her lover; dual conceptions that resulted in Aphrodite Pandemos, the postures of Priapos, the leer of the Lampsacene, and, with them, forms of worship comparable, in the circumadjacent beauty, to latrinæ in a garden, ignoble shapes that violated the candour of maidens' eyes, but with which Greece became so accustomed that on them moral aphorisms were engraved.
In the first two dynasties, which had their seats at the cities of Kish and Erech, we see gods mingling with men upon the earth. Tammuz, the god of vegetation, for whose annual death Ezekiel saw women weeping beside the Temple at Jerusalem, is here an earthly monarch. He appears to be described as "a hunter", a phrase which recalls the death of Adonis in Greek mythology.
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